Grave Wax
by Gray Glube
Summary: Halloween changes things
1. Constance

**Author**: Gray Glube

**Title**: Grave Wax

**Summary**: Halloween changes things.

**Rating**: M

**Warning(s)**: Violence, Language, Sexual Situations, Canon Triggers, Necrophilia

**A/N**: Canon-ish AU with Constance, Violet, Tate segments. Just something short and not so sweet.

* * *

After Halloween things change in the strangest of ways for Violet, distance grows between her and Tate and in that distance a bridge gets built between her and Constance that's not as unsettling as it might have been otherwise.

Addie is dead and Constance knows Violet might not be far behind.

Girlhood is a difficult time, she knows. Violet will need all the help her unfortunate parents cannot provide. All she has is time now, days that seem endless, a television devoid of ethnic Latino cartoons and talking animals.

One night with Billie Dean smoking a cigarette on the left side of her kitchen table the younger blonde starts and looks at the backdoor.

"Something's wrong."

Constance arrives, watches Tate sob with Violet in his lap in the tub, she dumps ipecac down her throat with his help and sets her to bed, next door. Temptation has always been too much for her boy and she doesn't trust him not to smother her.

She takes in Violet, longing for tea and cigarettes after school, walking little mongrel dogs on the weekends, Long Island ice tea and card games during the summer a replacement daughter.

Constance loves her children, Tate is her child…but sometimes, and she'll will breathe deeply or take a long sip, he is an overpoweringly antagonistic and petty child.

Billie Dean consoles her and counsels Violet, helps her accept the reality of her favorite son being what he is, and helps Violet understand what Billie thinks is some sort of gift when it's really just the malevolence existence of the house next door.

Violet scoffs but Constance is beginning to see that there may be something there.

They talk about his faults.

Discovery always comes too late.

Violet walks in, her mother is home from the hospital, with and without a baby. She had heard the ambulance come during the night, caterwauls and waves of red light around her kitchen at the unreasonable hour of eleven thirty.

"How is she?"

"Doped."

She dislikes the flippancy, the vulgar language but Violet is young and raised by a charlatan and an ineffectual housewife.

"It's for the best."

She nods to herself while Violet seethes in some well-steeped worry and anger over something because girls her age are always so unnecessarily angry.

"You're a grandmother."

"Excuse me?"

She pauses with the ice she's dropping into her glass.

"He raped my mother."

She doesn't understand.

"How would he have done that? When?"

"I thought she was crazy, she said a man in a rubber suit raped her, she thought it was my dad when it happened but my dad said it wasn't him. He threw it out. The suit was in the attic when we got the house. And Tate put it on and did it."

"How do you…know?"

"Nora was in the baby's room. She told me. Moira told me. _Tate_ told me."

She lets the ice drop from her fingers, they are numb now. Her mind spins, webs, dissolves. She takes a heavy sip, "Well, what would you like me to do about it?"

Violet doesn't answer, she just starts to cry. Eventually she sends her home following the press of a cold washcloth to calm the red blotchiness marring the girl's face into something ugly and mean.

What she does it confronts, confirms, consoles in the aftermath. Temptation has always been her boy's most potent form of retribution against her.

It is late, again, nights later and Violet is on her sofa in the sitting room smoking, her sweater smells like an ashtray, her hair is a mess and her disposition is poisonous.

"You should be home with your mother. She's going to need you there."

"I've been thinking about what he did and you know what I realized?"

"I don't know, I came down to make a drink."

"You know why he chose my mom? Because he could fool her. Make her think it was my dad. But what if he could have done it to me? He would have."

"Men will always do that to women, if given the chance. There's a fact for you. That dower thing in the basement kept at him, I couldn't be there. Part of the fault is mine. I'm sorry."

"I just…"

"It's in their nature, they can't help it."

The girl smiles and nods and takes in the truth that men are in most ways useless and disappointing and awful creatures.

* * *

**A/N:** Just a short little something to tide me over and help me procrastinate from other things.


	2. Violet

**Author**: Gray Glube

**Title**: Grave Wax

**Summary**: Halloween changes things.

**Rating**: M

**Warning(s)**: Violence, Language, Sexual Situations, Canon Triggers, Necrophilia

**A/N**: Canon-ish AU with Constance, Violet, Tate segments. Just something short and not so sweet.

* * *

It's not forgiveness he's looking for, just a way to get back to where she'll show him a little tenderness again.

He tells her he'll do anything, to just talk to him. He says please.

"You keep her away from my brother."

It should be easy for him to do that much, her brother is small and sleepy on his blanket, she has him set down next to her on the floor.

"I want you to leave me alone, I don't want you around me or my mother. I don't want to have to make you."

"Okay."

She stands and he's walking forward, she holds up a hand and presses it out to stop his progress, "Fine." He sighs, comes closer anyway, she look down at her brother. Standing up makes her feel like they might step on him, it makes her uneasy.

"I'm sorry…," He's got arms around her and as good as it feels it doesn't feel as good as it used to. "Violet. I just tho…-"

He smells her hair and it's intensely awful.

"Stop. It's fine, so get off…" she pushes gently at his reluctance to uncoil his limbs, "Come on, off." He does but for a moment it feels like he won't. "And leave me alone. I want to be alone."

"…for how long?"

She smiles, slow and strange. Like an animal that doesn't seem quite right might make its mouth move in a way that seems too human.

"You raped my mother and got her pregnant and it killed my dad's baby and there's a ghost who wants to kill the only thing that is keeping my mother from shooting herself in the head. Right now I wish you really were dead but you aren't and can't be so I'm just going to pretend like you are."

"Violet,"

Again her hand goes up like punctuation at the end of a sentence.

"When my mother is happy again we can talk, so until then act like you're dead and keep everything around here quiet and nice and pleasant because if it isn't and something happens to my mom I'll leave and burn the fucking house down."

"Violet you can't do that. I wouldn't let you."

She knows and she's already come to the conclusion that one day she's going to have to leave forever, the metaphorical husband going out for cigarettes.

"Don't give me a reason to want to then."

"…"

There's a confusion of noise from the next bedroom.

The valium has worn off.

"She's up, I have to go play mom now."

She swoons down and bounces her brother up with a cooing smile and a babble of baby talk already gone back to pretending Tate's a ghost she can't see.

* * *

**A/N:** One last part


End file.
